Monday 12 October 2026

LibreWolf not what I expected

So, let me first say that LibreWolf is a very decent browser. Maybe it’s just old, crotchety me stuck in his Netscape Navigator ways (OK, thats not totally true since a lot of features I rely on now where not around in Netscape), but things did pop up that have led me back to Brave… for now.

So the pro’s are still there: The install on Debian 13 was simple, it is clean, familiar and renders sites with minimal issues. Bookmark import from Brave was a piece of cake and setting up a default profile was easy.

But there are enoough cons now that have pushed my back to Chromium-based web browsers. The biggest one (and again this might be an easy fix but it hasn’t been apparent to me yet) is that everytime I close the browser I ahve to log into my web sites. I looked in settings and nothing that I wouldn’t already have checked isn’t. That’s the biggest issue. I also noticed that some pages I have to consistently manage the WebGL context creation (and that took me a minute to figure out what and where it was). This wouldn’t be that big of an issue but it appears to be per web site, not browser profile specific. Also, I have some local hosted servers and sites that do not require https (only accessible locally) but because they are http only, they no longer work. Again, that is kind of a deal breaker.

But honestly, other than those, it’s a solid browser… but those features are all things that unless I spend time to figure out it they can be permanently resolved will keep me from using LibreWolf.

So I have used Chrome, Vivaldi, FireFox, Brave, LibreWolf, Konqueror and Opera. I plan on looking at some others, but unless it is a earth shattering game changer, I feel like Brave checks all the boxes for me.